Texas Senate approves $197B budget

Funds for water projects await debates

Texas lawmakers are one chamber and governor’s signature away from setting the fiscal course of the state for the next two years.

The Senate passed its budget bill, Senate Bill 1, 27-4 late Saturday afternoon, with the deadline for the end of the session looming Monday. The House is set to put its last vote on the budget today.

“We’ve struck a good balance here,” said Sen. Tommy Williams, R-The Woodlands, having noted that the bill is conservative in leaving a half-billion dollars below the constitutional spending cap but enough to handle priorities such as education and mental health.

Senate Bill 1 would increase overall spending by 3.7 percent from the last session — jumping from $190 billion to $197 billion.

General revenue, the pot of money that lawmakers have the most control over, would increase 8 percent, from $87.4 billion to $94.6 billion.

The budget makes massive moves for mental health financing, with a $298 million increase over the last budget.

Tea Party-affiliated senators voted against the bill.

Sen. Donna Campbell, R-New Braunfels, said she appreciates all of the hard work done on the budget, but she wants to see more spent in areas such as transportation.

“I would like to have seen more restraint in overall spending,“ she said. “I would’ve liked to have seen us find sustainable funding for transportation.”

Multiple bills that haven’t made it through the process, however, are tied to the overall fiscal future of the state.

“We’ve got a lot of balls in the air,” said Sen. Robert Duncan, R-Lubbock. Duncan was on the conference committee with nine other lawmakers to iron out disagreements and finalize HB 1025, one of the key pieces to fund water for the session.

Bills to establish a water fund — which would put $2 billion toward loan money for Texas water projects across the state — must get final consideration from lawmakers.

Senate Joint Resolution 1 would put to a vote a constitutional amendment to create the water fund.

House Bill 1025, a supplemental appropriations bill usually intended to cover unforeseen expenses, has become a vehicle for a number of issues. While SJR 1 would bring about a vote for the water fund, HB 1025 would provide $2 billion from the Rainy Day Fund to fill it.

HB 1025 would also provide $185 million for fighting wildfires, and $1.75 billion would go to a deferred payment to education from last session, using Rainy Day Fund money.

About $450 million could go toward roads degraded by oil and gas activity.

Public education would get another $200 million. That $200 million, which had been a must for Democrats, would combine with other funding in the budget to put about $4 billion in new money into public education. During the last session, lawmakers cut about $5.4 billion from public education to handle a $27 billion shortfall.

Other key budget bills are HB 6 and HB 7, which would help stop the process of the state taking in money through fees for special purposes and the hoarding the money for the purpose of certifying the budget. About $5 billion has been kept away, and HB 7 would increase spending from some funds and decrease fees to begin the process of diminishing the funds. One fund, the System Benefit Fund, contained $851 million used solely to balance the budget. The fund originally was meant to help low-income Texans pay electric bills.

HB 7 would give back more than $600 million to ratepayers. The Senate passed the conference committee changes, and the bill awaits the House approval as well before going to the governor.

EDUCATION

Education bills are high on the list to pass Monday. One measure that makes major changes in graduation and testing requirements is House Bill 5 from Rep. Jimmie Don Aycock, R-Killeen.

The number of end-of-course exams required in high school would decrease from 15 to five. Graduation requirements also were arranged in such a way that students could add a certain emphasis to a diploma, such as technology or business.

Critics have said the new requirements, which don’t require the highly regarded algebra II course for all students, dumb down education. However, lawmakers say the changes simply add flexibility for students, who could enter the workforce with two-year or four-year degrees.

“We came with really three goals,” said Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston, the Senate Public Education Committee chairman. “That was to reduce the number of STAAR tests, create flexibility in our graduation pathways ... and three to pass a strong charter bill that would expand the opportunity for great charters and close down bad charters.”

Lawmakers also approved SB 2, which would raise the number of charter school contracts allowed in the state and add quality controls to charter schools. The schools would have different renewal options depending on their academic performance and how they handle their finances, and the Texas Education Agency commissioner could revoke the charter for poor academic performance and financial standards.

TRANSPORTATION

State leaders began the session speaking of a need for transportation funding to build, maintain and fix roads and highways under the burden of about 1,000 people a day coming to Texas.

The situation came to be more critical when Texas Department of Transportation officials testified that after 2015, the department will need $4 billion more per year just to keep up with maintenance and congestion.

However, few overhauls in transportation funding made it to the House floor outside of a bill from Rep. Drew Darby, R-San Angelo, that would have increased registration fees by about $30.

Darby realized he didn’t have enough votes, and Gov. Rick Perry indicated that he would veto the bill, so Darby removed it. The bill could have helped provide $700 million per year to transportation, according to a state analysis.

Lawmakers did, however, add money to areas hurt by the booming energy industry. HB 1025 would spend $450 million on roads in counties loaded with oil and gas activity.

“The one thing we’ve fallen short on is transportation funding,” Sen. Tommy Williams, R-The Woodlands, said while presenting a budget bill to senators last week.

WATER

From the start, the 83rd legislative session was going to be a water session. Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst said he wanted to take $1 billion out of the Rainy Day Fund — properly called the Economic Stabilization Fund and fueled with oil and gas taxes — and put it into a water infrastructure bank.

The plan grew, and soon lawmakers decided they needed to put in $2 billion into the fund, which would be called the State Water Implementation Fund for Texas.

Communities and entities could take money from the fund, and pay it back at low interest rates, to spend it on projects involving pipelines, aquifers, desalination plants and conservation.

The money for the fund became embroiled in budget negotiations, with Democrats arguing that they wanted more money to go to public education, and many conservatives worried about taking too much from the Rainy Day Fund. The bill is meant to address water supply projects over the next 50 years, given that a statewide water plan detailing the water project needs calls for $27 billion in help from the state government over that time frame.

MEDICAID EXPANSION

Throughout the session, protesters came to the Capitol, chanting or shouting for the expansion of Medicaid, government health care for the poor.

The expansion was an optional part of President Barack Obama’s signature health care reform law. Medicaid could expand to parents and childless adults under age 65 whose incomes are below 133 percent of the federal poverty level. For the first three years, the federal government would cover 100 percent of the Medicaid costs of newly eligible people, and that would later drop to 90 percent. Texas could get $100 billion for investing $15 billion over 10 years, according to one economist’s estimate.

Texas chose not to participate. Perry said doing so would only put more people in “a broken system.”

Bills to offer a “Texas solution” to Medicaid, which would have laid out criteria for broadening Medicaid in the event that more money came through, did not pass through the chambers.

A number of bills appeared in the session regarding gun control, several in response to the fatal shooting in Newtown, Conn., late last year and the national gun debate that followed.

One bill would have criminalized enforcing new federal gun laws, and another would have criminalized enforcing new federal gun laws if they were found to be unconstitutional. Neither bill made it through the Senate.

However, lawmakers did pass HB 1009 from Rep. Jason Villalba, R-Dallas, that would set up a school marshal program similar to a sky marshal in school districts.

A law on “campus carry,” in which universities would default to allowing concealed weapons on campus buildings unless they opt out, stalled in the Senate after passing the House.

A number of other bills reducing hours for concealed handgun training, allowing for license fingerprinting remotely and decreasing license fees for some military and veterans were all sent to the governor.

Other issues, such as abortion and drug testing for welfare recipients, did not make it through the regular session.

Dewhurst said he asked the governor to place those items on a special session agenda should there be one.

A spokesman with the governor’s office said it is too early to speculate on a special session. The regular session ends Monday.

Matthew Waller covers the Legislature for Scripps Newspapers and works in Austin. Contact him at mwaller@gosanangelo.com or via Twitter @waller_matthew.